Man Exacts His Revenge After A Crocodile Eats His Wife

In October 2014, Demeteriya Nabire went to the edge of Lake Kyoga in Uganda to fetch water. She was with a group of women from her village.

A crocodile grabbed Nabire, dragged her away and no part of her was found.

Nabire was pregnant at the time and her husband, Mubarak Batambuze, 50, was devastated.

"The crocodile ate my wife entirely. Nothing was ever seen of her again — no clothes, no part of her body that I could identify. I just didn't know what to do — a mother and her unborn child. It was the end of my world. I was completely lost,” he told the BBC.

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Until January, no one had seen the crocodile. "Somebody called me and said, 'Mubarak, I have news for you — the crocodile that took your wife is here — we are looking at it now,’” he said.

Batambuze, a fisherman, went to the lake with some friends to confront the massive crocodile. "He was a very big monster, and we tried fighting him with stones and sticks. But there was nothing we could do," he said.

Still bent on avenging the death of his wide and unborn child, he sought the help of a blacksmith. "I explained to him that I was fighting a beast that had snatched and killed my wife and unborn baby. I really wanted my revenge, and asked the blacksmith to make me a spear that could kill the crocodile dead,” he said.

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"The Blacksmith asked me for ($5) and made the spear for me.” Though the cost was high for Batambuze, he agreed to pay for a spear with a barb on one side.

Oswald Tumanya, a Ugandan Wildlife Authority ranger, said the crocodile was more than 13 feet long and weighed about 1,300 pounds, but that didn’t deter Batambuze.

He went to confront the crocodile armed with the new spear. His friends were scared and asked him not to go through with his mission.

"I failed killing it the first time around," Batambuze told his friends, "I'm not bothered if I die killing this beast. I'm going to take it on with this spear, and I will make sure that it dies.”

Batambuze tied a rope to the spear so that when the tip was embedded in the crocodile, he could pull it out an angle — damaging more of the crocodile’s flesh.

"I put the spear into the crocodile's side, and while my friends were helping to throw stones at the beast's back, it tried getting its mouth up to attack me again.

"It turned violent, and then there was so much fear in the place. But I was so determined, and I wasn't afraid of dying. I just wanted it dead, so I put the spear in its side and I pulled the rope. That got the crocodile into trouble.”

After 90 minutes, the crocodile was dead. Batambuze and his friends made their way back to the village, carrying the crocodile. "There was so much shock. What really surprised everybody was how big the beast was. It wasn't an ordinary crocodile. It was so big. And people called me and my friends heroes," he said.

The crocodile was later taken to Makarere University in Kampala, where it was examined by Wilfred Emneku. He reported finding a tibia bone in the crocodile’s stomach and he believes it’s human, but he can’t be sure.

Adam Britton, a crocodile expert at Charles Darwin University in Australia, said he would be surprised if the tibia belonged to Nabire. "After 12 weeks... under normal conditions, it would be highly improbable for bones from the same meal to remain in the stomach," he said.

Batambuze doesn’t have a grave to mourn over. "Within myself I'm a very depressed man because I lost a wife and an unborn child," he said.

"But the locals keep on saying, 'Thank you for killing the beast, that's where we fetch water and we're sure it would have taken somebody else. Thank you so much, you did a great job.'"